I’ll Show You Fear…

T.S. Elliott wrote in The Waste Lands, from the first poem Burial of the Dead:

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

There are many interpretations, from a Greek story where a Sibyl is granted immortality (life as long as number of grains of sand in her hand), but not youth, therefore life is a torment ; or that dust, or the vision is nothingness - that there is an emptiness of memory, or belief.

In my opinion, the old joke - what walks on all fours in the morning (a child), two legs in the day (an adult) , and three legs in the evening (elderly) echoes in the poem… you, the reader, get to choose : I’ll show you some fear from your past or in your future. For we all come from dust and we return to it (so my Christian upbringing tells me).

There is also a relation to The Waste Lands to the legend of the Fisher King. …

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

What is the Fisher King ? In Arthurian Legend, it is a wounded king (protecting the Holy Grail), and the language in the legend alludes to the fact that the land itself is wounded and festering in kind. Here we have a king - a leader- who has turned his back to his destroyed lands , gathering the resources (fish) asking the reader if he should get his land … this arid desert in order. Fish, of course, can be used as fertilizer , the water to irrigate.

So, we have in one hand, this concept that we come from and return to nothingness , and on the other hand a responsibility for authority figures to nourish and maintain their lands before the end comes for them. The desolation of the arid plain stands to instill fear in the reader that society will fall into disarray and destruction either from things forgotten in shadow of the past, or unplanned in the future, and require good leadership before entropy sets in.

Five Miles Downrange:

Learn from our past. The blood and bones of all our ancestors created this land. See the mistakes we universally have made in history, learn the truth of these actions and root causes.

Look to the future. Seek solutions with integrity. Irrespective of political or religious beliefs or bias, work to enable to solutions. No solution is perfect. If you realize that sometimes the best solution may be an 80% solution; accept that reality and compromise. Be truthful with results. Adaptation only comes from acknowledging the reality of the situation.

Have a shared understanding. Leadership needs to understand, with no uncertain terms, the issue being addressed and why. In order to reach that 80% (at best) solution set, those with the means to enable the solution have to understand all the interfaces to fix the issue. There needs to be a level of trust between leaders and the people…where that doesn’t exist, controls should be established as part of the solution.

Without this, people will always live in fear. A world without fear is our Holy Grail.

6/3/2020 JES edits…..

Sleep deprived, I did some research this morning on this issue and found the following articles helpful in capturing root cause of the above discussion. There are probably more articles out there, but wanted to capture these for reader’s pleasure.

1998 article by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom at the Brookings Institute entitled Black Progress: How far we’ve come, and how far we have to go. Discusses measurements of equality from the Civil Rights Era to the 1990’s - what worked and what didn’t.

2001 article by John McWhorter in the City Journal entitled What’s Holding Blacks Back? Discusses the central themes of Victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism - how these issues came to be in African American culture and how this was driving racial relations in 2001.

2019 article by Pew Research Center entitled Race in America 2019. Discusses points of view from respondents based on race, sex, age, and educational backgrounds.

2020 interview by the New Yorker entitled How Violent Protests Change Politics. Detailed interview with Omar Wasow, a professor of politics at Princeton who saw tactics deployed during the Civil-Rights Era (both violent and non-vioent). Discussion on the efficacy of these tactics in the time they were employed, and the success of them as a tool for change.